Game Addiction (and a crazy video clip)

After watching these two clips, I can say with confidence that the human race will end in the next century.

Why do people criminalize games? They make them seem like the problem here. It's the same with other objects that get easy blame, like guns. If some guy walks into his office and caps twelve people, do you blame the gun? Fuck no. You blame the psychopath who decided that killing his fellow employees would be a more efficient way to vent out his frustration.

People become addicted to many things much more dangerous than gaming. Why do game addicts get front page news when people still kill each other over cocaine? I'm pretty sure I can assume without a source that more people die over cocaine than video games each year. How about some news coverage?

The media is slowly turning the hobby of gaming into something like a drug and continues it's campaign against "escapism." So why the fuss over games and not movies? I play games on average of an hour or two per day because I enjoy them and they help me take some edge off my stress. The average movie is about an hour and a half, the midpoint of my statistics. There are people that watch more than a single movie a day, why aren't they addicts? I'll tell you why.

In my opinion, the public eye is being shown games in a negative light because of the history and what it means socially to be a gamer. Video games began as a phenomena for the general public when arcades started showing up. It was a cool thing to do to hang out at the arcade with some friends. Arcades faded away and then made a rebirth around the time the Nintendo entertainment system (NES) debuted. This was followed in the coming years by the first Game Boy. So slowly, video games became an in-home activity. Yeah, you could still invite some friends over and play, but it wasn't the same as an arcade. This lead to many believing that video games caused social isolation. Then came the birth of the game nerd. The geeky, coke-bottle rim glasses, the jeans up to the stomach, the inhaler, or anything else that made someone fit the stereotype.

The social meaning of being a gamer is one of poor quality to most people's standards. We're a culture that eats and breathes Hollywood, fame, materialism, and celebrities. If you're a gamer, you're supposed to smell, wear tight-fitting clothes (if you're skinny), eat cheetos and drink mountain dew, have no girlfriend (or be a virgin), be in either the A/V club or the chess club, and have no social skills whatsoever. That's what people tend to expect from a typical "gamer." While they may be right about a portion of the electronically enamored community, it doesn't speak to most because games are making a comeback to the social scene.

We're seeing gold-plated Playstation portables toted by celebrities, rappers at system launch parties, and hardcore gamers are getting TV time. While most of this is not necessarily amazing or new, it does show that because games are getting into the spotlight once again and with the spotlight, comes the microscope.

So now that I've ranted, what do you make of this negative media coverage? Do you think we can really blame games for addiction? If so, what do we do about other addictions? Why are people so quick to blame games and their makers?

While gaming addiction/video game violence/corruption of our youth is most defintely trumped up in the media and by watchdog groups, in this case the guys was simply fucking irresponsible.

The games are simply an avatar for addictive personalities. In that regard, it is identical to gambling, smoking, or drinking, as it fills a void that a person feels when they are not obsessed with something.

People are fucked up. There is no way to get addicted to a video game, at least not in a bad way. The only thing that you could get addicted to from a video game is the high from endorphins. Is there anything wrong with that? No. Plus, like Merc said, they take off a huge edge. Video games take you to a place and immerse you in a fantasy world where the possibilities are endless. They make you forget the world around and you can focus on your own little play world. If anything, I think everyone should play video games. I know a fifty-year-old man who works with me father and he plays X-box everyday. His doctor said he had extremely high blood pressure and would probably die from a heart attack. After playing video games, his blood pressure went down. So in a way, video games can even save lives.

People who complain about video games are stuck up politicians and soccer moms that have ran out of things to complain about. Kids aren't going to go out and shoot up the school because GTA told them too, they're going to because they're fucked up in the head and mommy and daddy don't love him. Same thing with smoking, kids aren't going to smoke because a camel in sunglasses told them too. They do it for the same reasons adults do. To relieve stress (and to look cool, but that's besides the point). Notice when a kid shoots someone, the parents say it was the violent video games (yet the forget to mention that they bought for him) and that they didn't see it coming. If they didn't they really fucked up as a parent. Parents never want to have anything to do with something that was their fault, but if the kid gets the Nobel Peace Prize, they're right up there taking all the glory for raising a great kid. Next day, the kid hangs himself, not they fault, the video games fault. Bullshit.

Because of the extreme variety of video games now, every kind of person is picking a controller. Everyone from the stereotypical fat-ass loser, all the way to the perfectly in-shape guy who gets ass every night. I play video games everyday; I have great friends and a great social life. Nothing wrong with me, video games didn't fuck me up. People blame video games because they want to take the blame for something they realize that might actually be their fault.

What's wrong with people? I really can't answer this question in words; there are so many things wrong with people. We're just selfish creatures that wander across this rock we call earth.

Merc, you are definitely right. I work at a GameStop and just recently, a new policy has come into effect- if I sell an M-Rated game to a minor, I get fired and so does the STORE manager. And I can't really blame GameStop either, because they're protecting themselves as well.

I tend to think that, as with anything new, people have a fear of the unknown. The same scare has happened to the film industry, rock music, rap, etc. It's definitely inconvenient, yet I'm starting to think it's necessary and a sort of "rite of passage" for the industry. People will question things they don't fully understand.

Video games, I suppose, also embody a sort of youthful irresponsibility and is a much easier target to attack than addiction or psychopathy. It really truly takes an addict to be addicted to games and a psychopath to find the inspiring for killing from games. Any level-headed gamer knows that games are not a source of destructive lifestyle, but really the opposite.

This virus will pass from the industry's system, as it will prove to be innocent.